Most helpful positive review

Unlike some other career books (Quitter, No More Mondays, & 48 days) this book is far more practical and does not so much focus on finding a "dream job" as it is on begin practical and sometimes having to re-market oneself for the job market. If one lives in a area where their dream job is going overseas, then they MUST re-market themselves or they will end up working at low paying jobs. I have spent far too much time on trying to find my dream job that I have damaged my career when I need to find ones marketable and what I can do. 48 Days, Quitter, and No More Mondays focus way too much on the "pie in the sky" and are not as practical as this one. I recommend this book very highly.

Most helpful critical review

Tory Johnson starts out this book with an example that is supposed to show us that she feels our pain. She tells us about the devastating experience of getting fired from NBC at age...22. No, I am not kidding. We hear the story of all her first job, how she liked it and how she got fired. Apparently she actually believes this example is meaningful. She was devastated but, she had $23,000 in the bank.(Presumably the result of a cash payout for being laid off.) She writes "With a cool $23,000 in the bank, going to the ATM, didn't seem so scary. That is until rent payments, retail therapy, and a few more cash withdrawls whittled away at those five figures."

As an executive recruiter I could not believe the egotistical indulgence of this story. I sit day after day hearing professional people, people with established careers, families and a lot to offer--tell me that they have been fired.

Being fired when you are expert at your profession, and ten years older than the junior player firing you is what is happening every day in this country. Its demoralizing. It makes you wonder who you are--and that is something that's a lot more painful at 50 than at 22. (At 22 you don't even know who you are.) So, in one fell swoop Johnson provedsshe doesn't have a clue--and tells a story guaranteed to demoralize most people who read this book.

Everyone has had a few stumbles at 22. Trust me Tory--ITS NOTHING. People who are twenty-two can actually survive on unemployment. People in their 50s with kids in college don't do "retail therapy." The only thing this silly story told me was that Tory Johnson made a lot of money when she was very young--and doesn't have any idea what being fired means when you are no longer a kid. Can you re-engineer your career? Unless you are a kid, this book isn't going to provide much help.

Ah but what about the solutions? Surely the solutions will be helpful regardless, right?

Wrong. The solutions in this book are for very junior or low level jobs. Some might work for women with young children who desperately need to be at home and are willing to take gigantic pay cuts. She makes the classic mistake of doing career counseling while talking about working from home. Note to all who want to work from home: Home is a location--not a career. First focus on what you have in your bag of experience--then ask yourself if you can do it from home.

Working from home actually can work very well for experienced people who have usable skills (tech writing for example) and can look for contract work, but Johnson doesn't go into ways that an experienced person can make it work. This book has another huge ommission in the form of tax advice. While Johnson explains that a 1099 contract worker needs to pay taxes quarterly, she fails to mention that the Social Security tax is DOUBLE for people who work from home. There are often other taxes as well, such as the New York City "Self-Employment" tax. Taxes in a place like NYC can easily eat up HALF of your paycheck before you pay your health insurance--so this is not a minor omission.

I would have been fine with this book if it had said it was for the recent college grad who just got the boot, but in this economy an awful lot of people with more experience than Tory Johnson have been fired and are going to spend their very precious dollars on this book--which will be a compete waste. You would be very hard pressed to support a family on the kinds of jobs Tory Johnson will find you. The condescention of this, coming from someone with Johnson's success, was irritating--to me anyway.

Getting a new job or changing careers when you are 22 or 25 is simply not that hard, even in this economy but if it happens to you, this book might help.

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Tory Johnson starts out this book with an example that is supposed to show us that she feels our pain. She tells us about the devastating experience of getting fired from NBC at age...22. No, I am not kidding. We hear the story of all her first job, how she liked it and how she got fired. Apparently she actually believes this example is meaningful. She was devastated but, she had $23,000 in the bank.(Presumably the result of a cash payout for being laid off.) She writes "With a cool $23,000 in the bank, going to the ATM, didn't seem so scary. That is until rent payments, retail therapy, and a few more cash withdrawls whittled away at those five figures."

As an executive recruiter I could not believe the egotistical indulgence of this story. I sit day after day hearing professional people, people with established careers, families and a lot to offer--tell me that they have been fired.

Being fired when you are expert at your profession, and ten years older than the junior player firing you is what is happening every day in this country. Its demoralizing. It makes you wonder who you are--and that is something that's a lot more painful at 50 than at 22. (At 22 you don't even know who you are.) So, in one fell swoop Johnson provedsshe doesn't have a clue--and tells a story guaranteed to demoralize most people who read this book.

Everyone has had a few stumbles at 22. Trust me Tory--ITS NOTHING. People who are twenty-two can actually survive on unemployment. People in their 50s with kids in college don't do "retail therapy." The only thing this silly story told me was that Tory Johnson made a lot of money when she was very young--and doesn't have any idea what being fired means when you are no longer a kid. Can you re-engineer your career? Unless you are a kid, this book isn't going to provide much help.

Ah but what about the solutions? Surely the solutions will be helpful regardless, right?

Wrong. The solutions in this book are for very junior or low level jobs. Some might work for women with young children who desperately need to be at home and are willing to take gigantic pay cuts. She makes the classic mistake of doing career counseling while talking about working from home. Note to all who want to work from home: Home is a location--not a career. First focus on what you have in your bag of experience--then ask yourself if you can do it from home.

Working from home actually can work very well for experienced people who have usable skills (tech writing for example) and can look for contract work, but Johnson doesn't go into ways that an experienced person can make it work. This book has another huge ommission in the form of tax advice. While Johnson explains that a 1099 contract worker needs to pay taxes quarterly, she fails to mention that the Social Security tax is DOUBLE for people who work from home. There are often other taxes as well, such as the New York City "Self-Employment" tax. Taxes in a place like NYC can easily eat up HALF of your paycheck before you pay your health insurance--so this is not a minor omission.

I would have been fine with this book if it had said it was for the recent college grad who just got the boot, but in this economy an awful lot of people with more experience than Tory Johnson have been fired and are going to spend their very precious dollars on this book--which will be a compete waste. You would be very hard pressed to support a family on the kinds of jobs Tory Johnson will find you. The condescention of this, coming from someone with Johnson's success, was irritating--to me anyway.

Getting a new job or changing careers when you are 22 or 25 is simply not that hard, even in this economy but if it happens to you, this book might help.

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I was at the library and this book was on display. Its title attracted me. "Maybe finally some solid advice for the less-than-sterling applicant," I thought. Not really. Although there is some acknowledgment of the particular toughness of the job market at the time of the book's publication (late 2009) and inclusion of the changes the Internet has made in looking for a job, there's very little here that couldn't be found in any standard job-hunting manual of the past 20 years or so. I'm not job-hunting, so it was mere curiosity that drew me to the book on the library shelf. Had I been out of work and spent the minimum $4.00 for it (one cent plus 3.99 "shipping and handling"), I'd feel ripped off. There's a lot of the obvious here, and little that's fresh, despite Johnson's inclusion of her favorite song titles for revving up one's job-hunting juices. Network, pump up the resume with action verbs, be ready to pass out those business cards at the bus stop and gas station. Yes, we know. The book is plumped up with plenty of name-dropping and what the author supposes are inspiring stories from the likes of people (network-anchor types, Maria Shriver, and so forth) that are likely to make the unemployed feel seriously inadequate. And she writes, as all such job coaches write, as if her reader were like herself: Type A, driven, people-oriented, highly-energized, so full of tangible accomplishments at her last job that she must whittle them down to a manageable list--and out of work? How? Do people like this get fired, even in a "down" economy, or stay out of work long enough to get used to sleeping late? I'm on the lookout for a book called "I Landed a Great Job After Doing Hard Time." Now, that one should have something fresh to say.

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Unlike some other career books (Quitter, No More Mondays, & 48 days) this book is far more practical and does not so much focus on finding a "dream job" as it is on begin practical and sometimes having to re-market oneself for the job market. If one lives in a area where their dream job is going overseas, then they MUST re-market themselves or they will end up working at low paying jobs. I have spent far too much time on trying to find my dream job that I have damaged my career when I need to find ones marketable and what I can do. 48 Days, Quitter, and No More Mondays focus way too much on the "pie in the sky" and are not as practical as this one. I recommend this book very highly.

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I couldn't decide while reading this book if it was really to help job seekers find a job, or if it was just a way for the author to talk about herself and name drop everyone she's rubbed shoulders with in TV and politics. There are a few good pieces of advice peppered throughout the book, but nothing seems to go into much depth. For example, the section on cover letters contains some pithy advice and a template cover letter that contains advice about what to put in each paragraph. Nowhere does the author actually show what she would consider and example of a good cover letter. Too much is left up to the reader to figure out. If she used more space in this book to give real job searching advice with examples rather than going on and on about her company and her contacts it would be much more useful. I have found several other job search books out there that offer a tremendous amount more advice with examples and models of how to do what is being suggested.

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I originally picked up "Fired to Hired" during what I expected to be a prolonged period of unemployment. I was going to use this time to potentially build a business or at the very least take my time in selecting a new company. Conditions changed (I found out I was going to be a father) and I ended up taking a position more quickly than I probably should have. Long story short, I am again faced with the potential of being tossed around by the whims of corporate America, so I thought that it would be a good time to start reading through some career books again. This book is somewhat better than most job hunting books in that it provides examples to help underscore its concepts (instead of just saying "trust us...it will work"). Unfortunately, you won't find anything new or revolutionary in this book. And its advice leans very heavily towards helping women find work...so men will not find it as useful. Solid job seeking advice, but not balanced enough to be helpful to everyone